


Organic Shrapnel

by disastrophe



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 13:32:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1430323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disastrophe/pseuds/disastrophe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was more to fear as Mafioso than Kurapika had originally thought, and it had very little to do with the Phantom Troupe. Pure speculation/what-ifs filling in the gap between post-York New City and chapter 340.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Organic Shrapnel

**Author's Note:**

> Kind of sort of an AU?

Light Nostrade handed him a freshly pressed suit and said, “You are to wear these to the museum tonight.”

Kurapika accepted it with the slightest bow, but said, “May I ask what’s wrong with my clothing presently?”

Light Nostrade said, “You aren’t wearing that,” and gave no room for argument.

So Kurapika neatly folded his tabard, stowed it with his small collection of belongings, and donned the suit. The chest was too tight and pinched at his armpits, and the collar of his undershirt was stiff with starch. Kurapika spent an hour in his room trying to tie his tie before he was confident enough for public.

“You look very smart,” Senritsu told him when he emerged.

He said, “Funny, I feel quite stupid.”

“Your tie is crooked,” she said, and motioned for him to bend over. “I’ll fix it for you.”

 

The museum affair that night was to celebrate bigwigs and what bigwigs did best: spend money. Kurapika was informed that quite a few Mafioso would be there, rubbing elbows with people who made their money through politics, through ponzi schemes, inherited and otherwise. White-collar criminals. An exclusive gig for the shareholders and investors who had given money at some point to extend the museum’s collection.

The motorcade for that night was comprised of three limos. Kurapika was to be Neon’s bodyguard, which irritated him.

“I’m just so happy Daddy agreed to let me attend,” she chatted as Kurapika constantly adjusted his tie. It was too tight, then too loose, then crooked. He thought of Leorio and suddenly felt a sudden respect growing for his immaculate tie.

Neon continued, regardless of how much attention Kurapika was paying: “The new exhibit’s going to be a riot. Daddy tells me they’ve acquired quite a collection of parts.” She giggled and picked at the sequins on her dress.

“I’m very happy for you, Boss,” he said blandly.

She pursed her lips and said, “Your complete lack of enthusiasm is really putting a damper on my mood.”

“My apologies,” Kurapika returned, but he didn’t mean it.

For a while they looked out opposite windows and watched the city lights go by in silence.

Then Neon said, “I was afraid that he had tired of me after my powers vanished.” She did not look away from the window, and he could not see her face. “It makes me really happy that he’d still take me out like this.”

Kurapika, who’d seen Light Nostrade tear out his hair trying to balance his failing accounts, just said, “Your father considers you to be very important.”

Neon frowned.“Yes he does,” she said.

When they arrived at the museum, it was bustling. The entrance was festooned with fairy lights, and people milled about in lavish coats and dresses. He heard a man’s gusty laughter on the other side of the courtyard.

Kurapika was helping Neon out of the limo when a car five lengths behind them exploded with such force that every window in the front entrance burst.

The air seemed to go out of the space around them and then it caught on fire. Their limo’s back tires were lifted off the ground. Kurapika only had a heartbeat between the explosion and the fallout, during which he threw himself at Neon’s back, pressing her into the car’s frame. The metal felt insubstantial now, somehow, as if all that stood between him and pelting glass rain was rice paper. He couldn’t breathe, he could barely hear, and what he could hear was roaring-- a deep, wild rush in his ears. Kurapika’s fingers tingled, his eyes buzzed, his back felt altogether too warm. He kept still, tried to steel himself, but he was so aware of how malleable he was. Was Neon even beside him anymore? It was too bright to tell, he was too numb to know.

It was a smoky and breathless handful of moments until people began to pick themselves out of the remains. A dozen of his fellow bodyguards rushed up out of the haze of debris. Light Nostrade demanded, “My daughter, is she safe?” He had a kerchief pressed to his mouth, but he was coughing despite it.

They peeled Kurapika away from Neon as easily as skin from a rabbit. He hadn’t the strength or presence of mind to protest or even stand-- he had been drained, been sapped of that ineffable certainty, somehow. They left him on the ground.

Neon, for her part, seemed to be unharmed. She cried in her father’s arms while they led her away-- for the cars, for the foregone exhibit, for the fact that she didn’t see it coming, for the fact that once, she might’ve.

When Senritsu found him later, he had not yet moved from where they left him.

“Are you alright?” she asked him, but he was suddenly waterproof, and her words slid off him.

“What?” Kurapika responded.

“Are you hurt?” She repeated, inching closer.

He grabbed onto her arm and said, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m OK.”

“You’re bleeding,” Senritsu told him. “Your back is torn up.”

“I’m fine,” said Kurapika, but the hand on hers was not steady.

Senritsu furrowed her brow, because the beating of his heart told her he wasn’t lying, which meant that he believed it.

 

The car bomb, he heard later, was the escalation of a fight between two families of La Cosa Nostra, who decided that public spectacle was the best way to settle a score.

The sirens had faded and took their rolling lights with them, but they still hadn’t power-washed the stains out of the pavement. Kurapika touched the shell of their limo, riddled with holes. Down there on the ground where it stank of burning rubber and iron, it was easy to laugh at the idea of invincibility.

 

Light Nostrade gave him honors.

“What would I have done if you weren’t there?” he railed, rifling through countless papers on his desk. It used to be that his desk was tidy-- the desk of a businessman. He had things to do, and hardly time enough to do them in. There was whiskey in the cabinet and the mahogany glowed like it was spit-shined. Neon lost her powers and the loan sharks came out, the papers piled, the whiskey moved from the cabinet to the desk, within arm’s length.

“What would I have done,” he repeated, pausing for a second. His eyes went wild, and he ran a hand through his graying hair.

“Sir?” prompted Kurapika. His back ached and he could hardly stand straight.

Light Nostrade started, seemed to notice Kurapika was there despite the fact that he had been standing before him for at least ten minutes, and snatched up a piece of paper. He took a moment to smooth it out and offered it to his bodyguard. “Here. Your salary.”

It was the deed for an office building the Nostrades had picked up in the boom. What it was doing now, scattered on Light Nostrade’s desk, Kurapika could only guess.  
He accepted the deed. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” the man said, absent again. “Now get those other useless sacks of shit out of my sight.”

Kurapika left his office and shut the door behind him quietly.

Basho, standing guard outside, said, “How is the Boss doing?”

Kurapika said, “He says he would like to be left alone.”

 

It was getting light when Kurapika returned to his room, patched and threaded back together. He had thrown the suit out. It was ripped to pieces, blood-stained. There was a ringing in his ears that he couldn’t sit with.

He texted Leorio.

 _I hope you are safe and well_ , it said. Within a minute he got a response.

_u too!! how r u? I could call_

He texted, _I am fine. Please do not call._ And then took one more painkiller than he was supposed to.

 

Days later, his skin itched and red bumps appeared on his back.

“It's what they call organic shrapnel,” said Senritsu, cleaning his wounds with a swab of alcohol. Senritsu worked with tweezers and alcohol and gentle, gentle fingers and Kurapika realized how it was that people like her and Leorio could be doctors and he could not. She did not define her words.

Kurapika swallowed bile because she could be opaque as she wanted but he still knew what it meant. Bits of skin burrowed into his own, blasted from the skeletons of bystanders, festering underneath his healing wounds. Corrupting him from the inside-out. This was murder made flesh, violence inscribed onto his own body. He was angry enough to burst.

“Am I hurting you?” Senritsu asked, because she could hear his anger rushing through him like war drums.

“No,” he said. “You aren’t hurting me.” He cupped his face, plugged his ears, shook his head. “My ears are just ringing.”

She rubbed small circles into his shoulder. He wondered how she, with her sensitive ears, how hers weren’t still filled with that sound, too.

He took the longest, hottest shower he could stand and felt no cleaner for it.

 

“You and me,” Light Nostrade said when he called Kurapika into his office once again. “We’ve been through times.”

Kurapika was close to asking what times he was perhaps thinking of, but the empty bottles lining his Boss’s desk told him not to bother. He said, “Yes sir,” instead.

Light Nostrade leaned back into his chair and raised his glass. “Cheers,” he said. He downed it and became brighter. “You know what you are, kid? What you’ve become?”

Kurapika wasn’t sure what the man wanted to hear. He said, “I’m a Hunter. I don’t think that’s changed recently.”

“A Hunter, sure,” responded Light Nostrade, waving his hand. “There’s that. But now you’re _family_.”

Kurapika began to grow uncomfortable. He did not like that word spoken here, where the eyes of his clan were acquired like meat at the market and displayed like trophies.

He shifted his feet and said, “I’m flattered, sir.”

“But you don’t really know what that means, do you?” He poured himself another glass. “You are the most capable bodyguard I’ve hired. Driven, passionate. A real fire burning in you.” Kurapika felt these weren’t compliments. Light Nostrade pointed a thick finger at him. “How is it where each of the others failed, you’ve pulled though? You half cockroach, boy?” He laughed and it was cruel.

“Just doing my job, sir.”

“You’re a survivor, kid, that’s what you are. But you could be La Famiglia.” He raised his glass again, looked him in the eye. The offer, almost unspoken, hung in the air like a breath.

Kurapika said, “I appreciate the sentiment, sir. I will have to get back to you, as my personal affairs would get in the way, I’m afraid.”

Light Nostrade laughed at him. He said, “Get the fuck out of here.” And he drank his whiskey.

Kurapika left.

 

The office building-- the one Nostrade so generously bequeathed to him-- was a concrete, square thing, three floors high. Kurapika sat on an empty file cabinet tipped over on its side, among the brass wires, stripped nails, and dangling power cords. Cleaning the place seemed too large a task to contemplate. York New City required constant turnover and Light Nostrade had simply not kept up with the times. The bubble had burst here. The slums were pooling at the bottom of this city and this squat little concrete square would get its feet wet. It was an inheritance unworthy of inheriting.

He thought a lot about family these days. The Nostrades, the Mafia, La Famiglia, the eyes in formaldehyde, preserving a fatal flaw, a bad in the blood. Were family lines parallel or perpendicular?

 

“But sir,” said the woman at the civil servants office. “This-- this is a whole building.”

“I know,” Kurapika replied, and pushed the deed towards her again. “I am donating the whole building.”

“Oh,” she said, growing more flustered. “Well, sir, I’m afraid there’s more paperwork involved in-- in donations exceeding one thousand yenny and…” She looked at the paper once again, and slid her glasses up her nose. “This is quite a lot more than one thousand yenny.”

Kurapika frowned. “Can’t it be...a sort of anonymous donation?”

“Well-- well, no.”

He couldn’t even _give_ the thing away. He decided to invent. “I’ve only just come into possession of this building at a strange time in my life. I’d like to at least turn it over to the city so they can do what they will with it.”

“Sorry, sir,” she said. “There’s just a bit of red tape in the way. We’d need documentation-- you’d need to fill out paperwork-- it’d take a little bit of time--”

“I don’t exactly have a lot of time.” Nor was he completely certain that the building would clear the paperwork, which was something he did not say.

“Well, then,” she said slowly. “We appreciate your generous offer, but we have to decline.”

Kurapika scowled, because he wasn’t being generous, he was being very selfish, because the empty building made him think of other empty inheritances.

“Well,” he said. “That is a pity.”

 

He received a photo message from Gon. The picture barely even had him in frame, and only had half of Killua’s face besides. The accompanying text read, _Meeting a lot of really nice people! Miss you._

Kurapika didn’t reply, but he couldn’t bring himself to delete the photo, either.

 

“We haven’t had the time to speak recently,” said Senritsu. “How are you holding up?”

He wasn't. He wasn’t getting very good sleep and he ground his teeth at night whether or not he nodded off, so he was plagued by an almost constant headache. But he said, “I read a nice book the other day,” instead, which was true.

She smiled and said, “What was it about?”

But when he opened his mouth, he could not quite remember the topic. He had a voracious appetite for reading that he suspected came from having the same ten books to read in the village for almost twelve straight years. It was amazing to him then, when, upon finding himself in the outside world, he discovered that there weren’t just a thousand other books out there to read, but an amount that bordered on uncountable. He read every novel and manifesto that came his way, but lately he fell back onto quiet stories, domestic biographies, the lives of mountain climbers and gardeners and Hunters who did nothing but meditate for ten years at a time.

He couldn't recall that particular book, though.

Kurapika traced the protrusion of each knuckle and said, “Wouldn’t you know it, I’ve forgotten.”

At night, he ground painkillers between his teeth and slept on his stomach.

 

He needed this. Without this place and prestige, without the suits and the mansion, the Phantom Troupe was out of reach. He could not get far by following dead trails and months-old leads. He needed to sit in the rooms with people who made deals with those spiders. Weaving webs. Catching flies. 

 

“I need it back,” said Light Nostrade, his hair unkempt and his desk bare. Pieces of furniture were missing from his office. “You still have it, don’t you?”

Kurapika took his time picking over his words because Mr. Nostrade had a temper as short and bright as the end of a candle these days. “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”  
  
“The deed,” the man growled back, balling his fists. “The one I gave to you for holding. I’ve an offer on it now. I need it back from you.”  
  
Kurapika closed his eyes and said, “Seeing as none of us have been compensated for what is nearing two months now, I naturally sold it myself some time ago.”

Light Nostrade visibly shook. He pointed a finger at his bodyguard and said, “This is all your fault. I’ve got nothing because of you and those goddamn eyes.”

“I asked you if you were prepared to pay the amount at the auction house--” Kurapika tried to defend himself.

Light Nostrade buried his face in his hands. “It was those eyes,” he said, unhearing. “Those eyes and that bitch. They ruined me.”

“It’s not your daughter’s fault,” said Kurapika. “The fake eyes were a setback. Neon’s power disappearing was an unfortunate casualty. But sir, I promise you that--”

“You _promise me_?” The man became unhinged. “You’re fucking hired help, son. I could get rid of you faster than I could wipe my ass.”

 _What happened to La Famiglia_ , Kurapika thought wryly, but stayed mum.

For a few moments, Light Nostrade was silent. Then he seemed to compose himself and said, “You’ll pay me for the deed.”

Kurapika said, “I don’t have that kind of money.”

“What did you get for it when you sold it?”

“It is a bad market, sir. And the building was not worth a lot to begin with.”

Light Nostrade turned red in the face and stormed across the room in three awkward lopes to grab Kurapika by the lapels. He smelled like brassy, cheap whiskey.

Kurapika looked him in the eye and said, “This is a fight you’re not going to win, sir.”

Immediately after he said it, he knew he shouldn’t have. Desperate men were prone to do desperate things when challenged, especially proud men, especially broken men, proud like Light Nostrade was when his daughter could tell the future and he could make bank on it, and broken like he was when it all went to waste.  
Kurapika could have easily dodged the man’s next blow. He could have dodged it and had time to break his arm in at least two places. But instead he stood where he was as his employer threw a wild punch at him.

The strike made him stumble and sting, but he reeled not from the force of it but from an unexpected sense of satisfaction. It was unwarranted-- what masochistic urge had rooted him to the spot, what permission did he give to his legs to lock and for the pain to sting so sweetly? Nostrade’s ring had bit cleanly into the bridge of Kurapika’s nose, and the cut was leaking little splashes of bright blood down the right side of his face.

Light Nostrade himself had collapsed on the ground in a desperate heap, but he clutched at Kurapika’s trousers, fisting his hands in them, yelling, “This is your fault. This is your fault!” Kurapika tried to get the man to release him while beads of blood ran down his nose and into his mouth, but he wouldn’t budge. “You ruined me,” he insisted. “What happens to this family is on your shoulders. What I do next _isn’t my fault_.”

Finally extracting himself from the man’s grip, Kurapika said, “I’ll return when you have collected yourself, sir.”

When Kurapika closed the door to Light Nostrade’s office behind him, Basho said, “Are you alright?”

Kurapika smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and said, “Mr. Nostrade is not feeling well.”

 

“How did that happen?” Senritsu asked a little later.

Kurapika touched the bandage and said, "Just an accident. Don’t worry about it.” Which was not exactly like lying.

The purpling bruise on the bridge of his nose smarted, but he hated himself for not being angry about it.

 

“The other girls think that I am creepy,” said Neon, balancing an urn on her bed.

Kurapika made a thoughtful noise in Neon’s general direction as a response. He didn’t particularly want to strike up a conversation with the girl. He thought her to be trying at best, and at times such as these when her female escorts was not around to buffer her and attend to her wants and needs, he found her downright irritating. But expenses had to be cut.

Her hands, still bandaged from the second-degree burn she acquired the night of the museum, stilled the urn before she turned to pout at him. “Do you think that I’m creepy?” Neon prompted.

Kurapika felt a hot rage burn up when she invited him to play this game. This was a family of damaged desperates, he suddenly realized. He was the tether to which these mad dogs were attached to, revolving ever closer, foaming at the mouth.

He said, “It’s really not my place to reaffirm or prove wrong what other girls may say.”

“Come on,” she insisted. “You play emotionless vigilante long enough and you’ll start to believe it.” Neon rolled over, so that she was staring at the elaborate canopy of her bed.

The bandage over the cut on his nose throbbed painfully, but Kurapika did not say a word to Neon.

“Oh,” she said. “You _already_ believe it.”

 

Later, she asked him if he wanted to know why she’s bent on collecting grim body parts.

He responded that he did not.

She said, “I like feeling connected to things.”

He closed his eyes and counted the number of spots he saw under his lids.

She said, “I like it when things are broken down.” She held up a case of fingers, their desiccated nails black as charcoal. “I like essential things removed from their context. If I collect enough parts, maybe I can be essential, too. Do you think wanting to be irreplaceable makes me a bad person?”

He said, “That’s not what makes you a bad person,” before he could stop himself.

Neon laughed, like her father, and said, “I wonder what does, then.”

 

“You’re going door-to-door,” Light Nostrade grunted.

Kurapika scowled. He wasn’t a salesman. “Doing what?” he asked.

“Collecting,” the older man clarified, but not very much.

That was how Kurapika came into the business of making courtesy calls to every weasel-eyed crook in the country who had lent five dollars to the Nostrades in the past twenty years. It was a long list. The job was without reward and dangerous, because Nostrade’s associates disliked being reminded that they had outstanding favors. He had a feeling he was being punished.

That day he was knocking on Hugh Delwood’s door, a man described by Nostrade as a “daft little lout with no real sense.” He was instructed to “squeeze him for everything he was worth.”

The man who answered the door was squirrelly, wirey, and had a peculiar gray pallor.

He said, “What do you want?”

“I am here as a representative of Light Nostrade. He believes you may still have some outstanding fees.”  
  
Hugh Delwood spat. “Light’s dog comes pawing at my door for scraps, huh? It’s too damn bad all the breadcrumbs are gone.”

Kurapika bristled. “I am a professional Hunter, not some mongrel dog.”

“Sure you are,” said Hugh Delwood. “You’re a hound in the chicken coop, ruffling feathers. I’m being victimized.”

Scowling, Kurapika said, “If you have the money, I’d like to know so that I could perhaps stop darkening your doorstep.”

The man barked a little laugh and said, “If I had money to give, I’d have blown it all up Nostrade’s ass a long time ago.”

Kurapika had reservations about violence for the sake of violence. But when Hugh Delwood spoke, he briefly, disturbingly, wondered how white his teeth would look outside of his mouth. His fist landed neatly into the man's canine.

He quietly let himself into Delwood's apartment and closed the front door behind him. “You might wish, Mr. Delwood, looking back on this moment, that you had believed my bark and not invited my bite,” Kurapika told him, and by the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, his eyes looked just a shade redder than they had been before, and his cuff links glistened like knives.  
  
Hugh Delwood’s thin face tightened. “I don’t have a penny for the likes of Light Nostrade.”

He tried to press harder. “La Famiglia honors debts, Mr. Delwood.”

Hugh Delwood grinned, his canine a bloody hole now. “Once the money’s run out, allegiances don’t mean shit. Do you think we do what we do for the warm-fuzzies?”

Kurapika noted several things in the dimness of that apartment. Delwood’s sharp, diamond-cut watch face. His phone, next to which dozens of notes were piled. A pair of dress shoes. A number of keys too numerous for a man who lived inside a rathole with not a breadcrumb to his name.

“I have friends in higher places than Nostrade,” said Delwood, his chin thrust out as if in challenge. “Leave my apartment now and maybe I won’t call them out on you.”

Leaving Delwood’s apartment empty-handed felt too much like a concession.

 

Hugh Delwood, as it turned out, was a middle man, an intermediary, and a sloppy one at that. He wasn’t lying when he said that he didn’t have money all his own, but he had access to all the riches the black market had to offer. His warehouse, the entrance to which Kurapika granted himself in honor of repaying a debt, was hidden in plain sight on the wharf. Briney and molding, the warehouse was the receptacle for the menagerie of items he was holding for other Families, for trades between black market parties. The Mafia employed a number of third- and fourth-party individuals for mediating their trade. They were always watching their back, always expecting the knife to come from a brother first.

It was the principle of the thing, Kurapika told himself. He didn’t give a damn about the Family, but one shouldn’t play games when looking down the barrel of a gun. Make trouble for your own house, as the saying goes, and inherit the wind. And perhaps his pride was on the line, and perhaps he needed just one success in this string of failures, but he wouldn’t use those as justification later.

The warehouse was cluttered and unorganized. A shipment of the newest street drug, a number of banned firearms, the rattle of cages and the smell of urine from smuggled animals, a crate of knock-off watches, timepieces, rings. A glass canister and two watching eyes.

 

Nostrade sneered. “You saw that Delwood, did you?”

“Yes,” said Kurapika.

“What did he give you?”

“Not a single penny,” he said.

He was lying to a liar, he told himself. He had stolen from a thief and killed a killer. He was cancelling out. He was the settler of scores. He was the judge’s gavel and the jailer’s bars. He was in the right.

“Bastard,” Nostrade cursed, and threw his paper down on his desk. “He’s dead now. We’ll never see the color of his money.”

“Dead?” This was news to Kurapika. “How?”

Without meeting his bodyguard’s eyes, he said, “When you set out to make a smuggling ring, you make sure your client’s items don’t go missing.”

 

There was a storage unit the size of a closet across the city that held more money than the entire Nostrade endowment was worth. The eyes bobbed in their glass tank, more valuable than rubies, more crimson than blood. Sometimes when he walked in, just to check on them, just to make sure that they were real, he’d think that the eyes might have belonged to his mother’s. Then they’d be his father’s, the elder’s, Pairo’s. He’d convince himself of it every time.

A certainty was growing inside him, and it was cold, and it was finite, and it left very little room for anything else.

 

He'd have it all, but he'd have to give it all up first.

 

“You’re different,” Senritsu commented one day.

“Am I?” Kurapika responded, but he could only feign ignorance so much.

“And you’re proud of it,” she added.

Kurapika adjusted his collar. He said, “I am accommodating myself to the role foist upon me.”

Senritsu said, “Please don’t compromise yourself.”

He was mad then-- mad at her inability to see why he was acting the way he was acting, mad because he was embarrassed by his pride, mad because she didn’t hear that ringing in her ears even now, didn’t feel what it made him feel.

“I don’t make compromises,” he snapped. His eyes, unbidden, filled with red.

She did not so much as flinch. “You are not as absolute as you think, Kurapika.”

He left her in a huff because he didn’t want to admit that she was right, that he could feel that he had sacrificed something along the way, but he didn’t know when it happened and he didn’t want to start missing it.

 

“Kurapika?”

“Hmm.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes Leorio, I’m listening.”

“What did I just say?”

“Seminars running late. The intern mixed up the internal and the external carotid arteries.”

“Oh. Well. It’s hard to tell if you’re paying attention sometimes.”

He closed his eyes. More pills. Pink scars puckering on his back. “I’m sorry.”

“Senritsu tells me that you’re been pretty cagey lately. Not around a lot. That sort of thing.”

“I suppose I am. Tell her I’m sorry for me.”

“Why don’t you just tell her?”

“I think it’ll mean more coming from you. You make everything sound more earnest.”

“Should I take that as a compliment?”

“Take it how you want.” Silence. “Leorio?”

“Why can’t you just be straight with me?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Please don’t do anything dangerous.”

Already have. “I won’t.”

A tsk. “Should have agreed on another meeting date like last time. At least then I’d know when I’d see you in one piece. Maybe the kids could convince you better’n me.”

“Leorio.”

“Hmm.”

“Tell me about class.”

“What do you want to hear about that boring crap for?”

“I just do.” Silence again.

“I’ll have to tell you about what happened in practicum on Monday, at the very least…”

Kurapika closed his eyes and let him talk.

 

There were ants in the mansion, a great number of them marching through his employer’s home, looking for conquest, for crumbs. Ever since they let the gardener go, the ants, which had been invisible once, became brave. The bodyguards-- Basho, Senritsu, and himself-- attended the entirety of the mansion’s needs now. Nostrade was hesitant to let them go, for paranoia’s sake, perhaps, whether it was founded or not. Light Nostrade had locked the door to his office again, and the only noise Kurapika could hear from inside was the clink of glasses.

Something electric was in the house that day, even the ants knew it.

Basho, who had taken on maintenance of the mansion in the help’s absence, reported to Kurapika: “They’ve all hidden away. I was going treat the whole colony, but I can’t find a single one now.”

Kurapika said, “An ant problem is systematic. They don’t just move away.”

Basho shrugged. “I guess they do. Burrowed into the bones of this house, they’ll go down when it does.” For all his transparency, Basho was quite perceptive. He noticed Kurapika’s uneasiness, and said, “Boss still cooping himself up, Captain?”

“Please don’t call me that.”

He put a hand on Kurapika’s head and mussed his hair. “I’ll take care of the Boss, so don’t you worry yourself too much about him.”  
Kurapika frowned and ducked away from the man’s hand and tried to set his hair straight. He was not so much worried about Nostrade’s well-being as much as what he could do. He once had power in a single phone call.

He said, “You do that, then.”

Neon was eating breakfast in the dining hall when Kurapika found her.

“Senritsu, was it?” She was saying. “You do make the best eggs-- Eliza always either burnt them or made them too runny.”

Senritsu caught Kurapika’s eye and said, “Thank you, dear, I’ve had a lot of practice.” They shared a private smile.

“I’m sure,” continued Neon loudly, buttering toast. She shivered and pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Why is it so cold in here?”

Senritsu said, “We’ll close the windows, dear.”

“Strange that the windows are open, it’s getting so cool these days,” Kurapika said, mostly to himself.

It took him until he reached the window for the alarm bells to go off, for the sun to peek through the clouds enough that the light could shine off of something reflective in the tallest tree on the grounds, and it only took a second for him to react, but it took Senritsu half that time.

She yelled, “Get do--” and then the window seemed to implode, showering Kurapika and the dining hall in glass.

Snipers, he thought, snipers in trees to kill sixteen-year-old girls. His heart fell to his feet.

Senritsu had managed to overturn the dining table and safely tuck Neon underneath the legs. Despite Neon’s wailing, neither of them seemed injured.

The overturned butter dish was flecked with blood. It wasn’t Neon’s. He felt it at the tips of his fingers, pooling in the pit the crook of his elbow made, from a dozen cuts and slices made from the shattering glass window. The anger had been lit in him.

“Keep the Boss safe,” he told Senritsu. “I’m going to secure the premises.”

“Kurapika, wait--” she called after him, but he couldn’t be stopped.

When he made it into the forest surrounding the mansion, the sniper was gone. There were notches in the tree branches wide enough for a barrel, there were nails piercing the tree for easier climbing-- this had been planned, premeditated. How had they not noticed? The trail was getting cold, but the dowsing chain hesitated from only a moment before pointing Kurapika in the right direction. They weren’t difficult to track after that.

A single well-aimed blow was enough to drop the man to the ground. He was a sallow man, smelling of gunpowder and tree sap. When he bled it was like melted copper.

“Tell me who sent you,” he said, and felt the tender muscles in the man’s shoulder begin to give when he tested them.

“Light Nostrade,” the man confessed, his face buried in the ground.

Kurapika felt the anger leaching out of him, metamorphosing. Why would Nostrade want his own daughter assassinated? It didn’t make sense. She had been his world.  
But someone had to open the window.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not,” he insisted. “It was Nostrade. He’s wiring me the money as we speak.”

His grip on the sniper’s wrist was enough to break bone. “You don’t get the money if you don’t do your job.”

 

Senritsu was waiting for him at the gates. “Are you alright? Is everything okay? You’re bleeding quite a bit still.”

“It’s fine,” he said, wiping blood from his knuckles on to his trousers. He let her believe it was his. “I took care of it.”

Senritsu frowned. “No, it’s not. What happened?”

“I need to see Mr. Nostrade.” He left her standing at the gate.

Light Nostrade’s office was quiet when Kurapika reached it.

“Basho,” he said to the man who, true to his word, had been standing guard the whole time. “I need to you go look after Neon for a while.”

“What happened?” The man asked him. “Your arm’s bleeding like a stuck pig. I heard something crash. Are we under attack?”

Kurapika said, “Please go find Neon and look after her.” Basho was ready to fight him. He said, “Please,” and tried to dissuade him with the way his voice quavered. Basho threw his hands up and gave up the battle.

There was no sound from Light Nostrade’s office when Kurapika knocked. “Mr. Nostrade,” he said. “I need to speak with you.”

When still he received no answer, he broke the door down. The hinges popped off like stoppers from a champagne bottle.

Light Nostrade was sitting at his desk, curtains drawn, drinking straight from the bottle.

“There’s been an incident,” Kurapika said, picking his words carefully. He dropped each one like a dagger.

“Tell me what happened,” Light Nostrade said, his eyes dark and unfocused.

“There was a sniper in the woods. I’m certain his target was your daughter.” Nostrade put his head in his hands. “Fortunately, I took care of him, with no harm to Neon.” He thought he saw Mr. Nostrade’s shoulders quiver.

“He said a funny thing to me,” he continued after a moment’s pause. Kurapika tried to gauge a reaction, but he received none. “He said you hired him to kill your daughter.”

Light Nostrade looked at him without apology, without affirmation or guilt. He said, “Did he?”

Kurapika felt the sniper’s blood burn on his knuckles where he’d wiped it away. He felt a damn behind his eyes starting to give under the weight of everything he’d done for this man.

“How much was your daughter’s life worth?” he asked. He could barely find his voice. “How much were you planning to to get from the insurance company after she died?”

“Five hundred thousand.”

“Not enough to start over.”

“It was enough to keep me afloat,” he snapped. “But because of you, we’re all going to drown.” It would have been a threat if Nostrade had any poison left in him. Now he just said, “I’m taking you down with me.”

Kurapika said, “I’ll be here long after you, sir.” A cockroach, Nostrade had called him. 

 

Basho was a big man, and Kurapika was surprised to see all of his belongs fit in only one small bag. He supposed it was true that he rarely even wore a shirt. He accumulated nothing. He was a rolling stone which gathered no moss and Kurapika felt suddenly, irrationally, jealous.

“It was nice to work with you, Captain. I hope to have the opportunity to do so again.” He put a hand on the boy’s head, which Kurapika quickly removed.

“Please don’t call me that.”

“From my heart to yours, kid, I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Kurapika frowned. “Your syallables are all off.”

Basho grinned and showed all his teeth. “Not a Haiku, Captain. Just a good luck charm.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think it’d do me much good.”

“No harm in it, though,” he sniffed.

“I’m sorry it had to end this way.”

“It’s not your fault, so stop talkin’ like it is,” he said, and began to walk away.

Senritsu was not so easy to do away with.

“What are you going to do now?” She asked him, stilling her hat when it was stirred by the wind.

He didn’t have an answer that wasn’t a lie and she knew it.

They stood together on the edges of the Nostrade property with the air smelling of antiseptic.

He said, “I’m about to make some compromises. Please don’t think less of me when I do.”

Senritsu said, “Your tie is crooked,” and motioned for him to bend down. When he did so, she pulled him into a hug as fierce as her small body could manage.

“I’m supposed to keep you on the straight and narrow, you know,” she said, her voice quavering. “But you keep insisting on wandering off where I can’t see you.”

“I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She pulled away, dabbing at an eye. “But you’re not going to stop, are you?”

He didn’t say anything, because how could he stop, he wasn’t sure how.

“I want you to know that I’ll be there if you need me.”

“I know.”

“No,” said Senritsu, and she took a hold of his sleeve and didn’t let go. “I want you to know your limits and when you hit them, I want you to know that there are folks out there who will worry when you try to exceed them.”

“I know there are.”

“I don’t think you do.”

He closed his eyes and smiled despite himself. “I learn quickly.”

 

The mansion was quiet and dark. In his office, Light Nostrade drank and drank and held his head between his hands. Kurapika watched him.

He said, “Please, sir. Consider leaving things to me.” The cut on his nose was a shiny red welt.

Nostrade said, “You think you can clear away the slate? You think you can do what I can’t?”

No, was the answer, no he couldn’t, but he needed to.

He said, “I’m willing to try.” And when Nostrade looked into his eyes, the man was afraid.

 

When he was young and golden and scraped his knees every other day, he played games in the forest and never worried about getting lost. Pairo was his best friend, inseparable because they had cut their thumbs open with Kurapika’s father’s knife and declared themselves blood brothers, because they taught each other languages they weren’t supposed to know.

Playing tag with only two, though, was tedious after so long, so they’d invent rules, introduce a point system, mutated the game so that it wasn’t even tag anymore, it was just Their Game. Their parents thought it was needlessly complicated, and he and Pairo took joy in the inaccessibility of it.

The rule for being tagged was that you had to lie down and say “I’m dead” ten times in succession before you were allowed to get up again. Kurapika was notorious for cheating, so Pairo, instead of running away like he was supposed to (for that was what the rule was for, to put some distance between them, for sport), always stayed close and made sure he reached ten.

“I’m dead. I’m dead, I’m dead,” Kurapika would say, and shimmy on his elbows towards his friend.

“If you’re dead, you can’t move!” Pairo would say. “You’re cheating!”

“I’m dead! I’m dead,” Kurapika sighed into the duff, the fallen leaves, the bark and the vines, the sweet-smelling flowers and the mushrooms. “I’m dead.”

But by the count of ten he wasn’t dead anymore and Pairo hadn’t moved so he was easy prey. Kurapika was always faster, but never smarter.

In the storage unit, years since he’d played, Kurapika closed his eyes and said, “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead,” ten times. “You can come back to life now.”

And when he opened his eyes, his heart thrummed in his chest and his muscles ached in the way that lack of sleep makes them ache, but the eyes were only ever going to be eyes. They had forgotten the rules to the game.

 

Picking his teeth with the ace of spades, the youngest Mafioso of the Ten Dons regarded Kurapika with supernaturally blue eyes.

“And what can we do for you, uh--” He smacked the smart-suited man next to him and asked, “What was his name again?”

“My name is Kurapika,” he answered for himself. “And I am here representing the Nostrade family.”

Men laughed at the name, men in shining shoes with shining teeth, and Kurapika felt a heat rising in his head. He felt, acutely, as if the buttons of his suit were made of iron, heavy with the weight of what he was doing.

The Don’s face split into a wide, unctuous grin. “Of course. What can the Ten Dons do for the Nostrades?”

“I’ve got an offer for you I think you will appreciate.”

The Don laughed. “A little too big for your britches, I’d say.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Nostrade owes us quite an amount. What do could you have to settle the score in one fell swoop?”

“I have capital,” Kurapika said, affecting a confidence he did not quite have.

The table broke out in hoots and haws, but he did not break his gaze from the Don’s wide face. In the den of hyenas, came the thought, and he could feel his palms begin to sweat.

“Capital?" the Don finally managed. “Why didn’t just just say so earlier?” The table laughed again.

When Kurapika set the eyes down, no one laughed. Every slick-haired mafioso went quiet. He thought he could hear a cigarette drop.

“I've got a bargaining chip,” Kurapika elaborated, turning the container so that the eyes looked only a him. This is what anger feels like, he told himself. You have to spend money to make money. You have to sacrifice to gain. He'd find the Phantom Troupe, he'd kill the spiders, and this was what he needed to do to do it.

Every animal in the room salivated. “A piece like that goes for a lot around here,” said the Don, sweating. “What are you asking for it?”

“I’m virtually giving it away,” Kurapika said. “But I’ve got stipulations.”

 

In the cigar room afterwards, the families of the Ten Dons buzzed.

“That was his bodygaurd?” one said incredulously, breathing smoke. “I’ll be damned. I thought he was born into the business.”

The Don, one hand on the container of eyes, said, “That boy sat in a roomful of criminals and we were the ones quaking in our boots.”

“We’ll be glad to have him,” someone else said. “And sore when he gets the better of all of us.”

 

Kurapika arrived in Light Nostrade’s office with a document absolving the Family’s debt, sealed by the Ten Dons themselves.

The man broke down in sobs, and when he spoke next, it was not in words of thanks. “How did you do it?” He begged to know, and what he was asking was: how did you do so easily what I could not do, when what I spent years building and crumbled to dust in a flash, you have rebuilt with a piece of paper. There was a sharpness, a hunger in his eyes. “What did you sell?”

Too much, Kurapika was tempted to say, something you could never have fathomed, but he hated himself too much for it. The implication that money was worth anything in comparison sickened him.

Instead he said, “Please,” and removed Nostrade’s pleading hands from his shoulder. “Didn’t I tell you to leave it to me, sir?”

Light Nostrade said, “Of course, of course,” simpered and sobbed and Kurapika’s stomach soured. “I’ll leave it to you. You’re family. Famiglia. _Family._ ”

In his room, Kurapika was sick in the bathroom thinking of his mother’s eyes, his father’s eyes, Pairo’s eyes, the elder’s, in that den of animals. He drank water and took painkillers for the headache he didn't have and threw it all up again.

 _I am the settler of scores_ , he thought as he tasted bile again and again. _You have to dig a grave to put something in it._

 

He spent a lot of time in that empty storage unit, time he left unaccounted for. He was losing his sense of scale. He tried to hold on to that grave in the desert, the one he dug for the giant man. He rubbed fiercely at his eyes when he remembered it, because the memory itself seemed to be blowing away in that cold desert air like so much sand, he was forgetting what it felt like to kill a man, and that, he thought, that was dangerous.

 

Things fell into place neatly after that. Racketeering was such a dirty word, but in practice it was quite kind. For a cut of the profits, Kurapika allowed the families to smuggle their black market items in and out of his gray, squat office building. People expected it from the warehouse by the wharf, but not from the building where men would have brought their ties and briefcases to work.

People noticed. When they did, he would approach them, convince and cajole them, because the Mafia wasn’t hurting anyone, the Mafia looks out for their own, the Mafia could look out for them, too…

 

The phone rang and rang and he never picked it up. He lay on his bed in the early hours of the morning, unable to sleep, and listened to it vibrate itself off the bedside table. He picked it up, and held it to his chest, imagined that the vibrations would power his heart, two machines in unison.

He counted his sins like he was sentencing himself to prison-- racketeering, coercion, smuggling, but oh who has the authority to judge a licensed blacklist Hunter, who could say that the means didn't justify the end. 

The eyes, he thought, and closed his. Injustice must spawn justice. He had to hold onto that, at least. The eyes, the eyes, the eyes. Be absolute.

The phone rang.


End file.
